On Monday, Matt Baggott surfaced briefly to say the UVF are involved in
fomenting rioting in east Belfast.

“I am concerned that senior members of the UVF in east Belfast - as
individuals - have been increasingly orchestrating some of this
violence. That is utterly unacceptable and is being done for their own
selfish motives,” he said.

Now what would those motives be? We know the boss in east Belfast
paddles his own canoe and that in the summer of 2011 he organised
rioting in much the same areas as are now suffering. The trouble then
spread to the usual places - Portadown, Ballyclare, Larne, Ballymena. At
that time the outbreak was regarded as a pretty obvious demand for money
which was duly supplied to ‘the community’. What could it be about this
time since it’s difficult to see where more money could be shovelled
into east Belfast ‘community projects’, which would be dominated by -
guess who?

How about this? In 2009 Gary Haggarty was arrested by the Historical
Enquiries Team (HET) on foot of investigations by Nuala O’Loan some
years before. He quickly confessed his senior role in the UVF and became
what is known under the Serious Organised Crime and Police Act (Socpa)
as an ‘assisting offender’. That’s what they call a supergrass now.
Since then he was interrogated by HET, an interrogation which produced,
wait for it, an extraordinary 30,000 pages of evidence and 760 interview
tapes.

Forty-year-old Haggarty, a self-confessed senior UVF man - some say he
was number one in south-east Antrim - has apparently named every senior
UVF man in Belfast in the past 20 years and given chapter and verse of
murder, robbery, extortion and collusion with RUC Special Branch.
Despite being charged with nine serious offences, including murder, on
November 22. Haggarty was granted bail under strict conditions and
whisked to a safe house, no doubt in England. In other words the deal is
done. Haggarty’s case is due to come up this year. It has potentially
explosive repercussions for the UVF.

Ten days after Haggarty’s bail, individual UVF members were out on the
streets of Belfast ‘orchestrating violence’ at the city hall. The
prospect of Haggarty’s evidence is giving the UVF the heebie-jeebies.
Whereas 30 years ago supergrasses could receive immunity for testifying
against their associates, under Socpa they cannot. They are sentenced
and then can have their sentence reduced to as little as three years but
only if they testify against their accomplices. When Haggarty’s case
comes up, he must confess everything he knows or else he goes down for
the full sentence. If he does, what will the DPP do? Ignore his
testimony? Prosecute senior UVF men named? What do you think?

What these very destabilising circumstances in the UVF mean is that even
if some solution is found for the flag protests, disturbances will not
end in loyalist districts which the UVF control. No wonder graffiti
round the UVF Mount Vernon stronghold says, “HET forget the past”.

When people say the commotion in unionism is about more than flags
they’re right. The consternation in the UVF is the result of the failure
of northern politicians to produce an acceptable process for resolving
the past. One former proconsul ran away from the best solution proposed
so far, the Eames-Bradley report. Since then nothing has been done or is
likely to be done under our proconsul who has appeared completely out of
her depth in the last month.

Until there is a coherent proposal to satisfy victims, relatives and
survivors of past violence, piecemeal and random prosecutions will
continue to have the potential for destabilising the whole political
process here. UVF members out on the streets of east Belfast and
elsewhere are giving notice that they can destroy any attempt by
Stormont politicians to create a pacified society here.

Pretending the disturbances are about flags or Mike Nesbitt’s truly
pathetic ‘chipping away at Britishness’ ignores the anxiety gnawing away
within loyalism that unpredictable investigations by the HET threaten
the UVF more than republicans and worse, that, when the HET’s money runs
out in a couple of years, anyone not already prosecuted will go scot
free. There has to be a better way.

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